1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates in general computing systems, and more particularly to increased in-line deduplication efficiency.
2. Description of the Related Art
In today's society, computer systems are commonplace. Computer systems may be found in the workplace, at home, or at school. Computer systems may include data storage systems or disk storage systems, to process and store data. One such process is data deduplication. Data deduplication refers to the reduction and/or elimination of redundant data. In a data deduplication process, duplicate copies of data are reduced or eliminated, leaving a minimal amount of redundant copies, or a single copy of the data, respectively. Using deduplication processes provides a variety of benefits, such as reduction of required storage capacity and reduced need for network bandwidth. Due to these and other benefits, deduplication has emerged in recent years as a highly important technological field in computing storage systems.